The Kuwait Weeks were born out of a con­ver­sa­tion I had with Kuwaiti pho­tog­ra­pher Mohammed Alk­ouh, who is cur­rently hav­ing a solo show at CAP Kuwait, which includes a num­ber of his recent stu­dio por­traits. We talked about his encoun­ters in the tra­di­tional por­trait stu­dios, which gave him the love for the hand-colored image, and how for him those pho­tographs, like real life instances of Oscar Wilde’s pic­tures of Dorian Gray, con­tained the pres­ence and the youth of a fam­ily mem­ber now in advanced age or even deceased. And how the vin­tage image has this mys­te­ri­ous time-warp qual­ity that we can­not shake off or stop being fas­ci­nated by — an addic­tion mer­ci­less tapped into and catered to by sev­eral online plat­forms, numer­ous photo books, col­lec­tions, some gal­leries, eBay sell­ers and auctioneers.

Some few weeks later it tran­spired that the Royal Trop­i­cal Insti­tute (aka Tropen­mu­seum) in Ams­ter­dam pur­chased a num­ber of Mohammed Alkouh’s prints from Tomorrow’s Past for their own col­lec­tion. A good rea­son for a meet up with the cura­tor for the MENA region, Mir­jam Shatanawi, and to visit the museum, which hap­pened to host the exhi­bi­tion Bag­dad Photo Stu­dio.

On their web­site some infor­ma­tion about this col­lec­tion of images:

“Yaseen Al-Obeidy has taken thou­sands of pho­tographs in the last 45 years. In his photo stu­dios in Basra and Bagh­dad he has immor­tal­ized the peo­ple from his neigh­bour­hood: chil­dren, men, women, bridal cou­ples and babies. At first in black and white and ana­logue, later in colour and dig­i­tal and, more­over, since 2001 inten­sively photoshopped.

The around 100 pho­tos that the Tropen­mu­seum will exhibit tell the story of ordi­nary peo­ple in an excep­tional coun­try. The unrest, wars and attacks they have suf­fered are not lit­er­ally depicted but form the unseen back­ground to the portraits.

Never before has an exhi­bi­tion been ded­i­cated to this type of pho­tog­ra­phy from Iraq: a pre­sen­ta­tion with ordi­nary peo­ple in the lead­ing role. The back­ground of the exhi­bi­tion is the Tropenmuseum’s recent pur­chase of part of Yaseen Al-Obeidy’s (born in Bagh­dad in 1951) photo archive. The col­lec­tion cov­ers the last 45 years – from 1968 to 2013 – and gives a unique insight into the recent Iraqi photo-studio cul­ture. The museum dis­cov­ered the pho­tos through Al-Obeidy’s son Zaid, who stayed in the Nether­lands for a short time a few years ago and played the lead­ing role in a the­atre per­for­mance about his father’s photo studio.

Mir­jam Shatanawi gave me an intro­duc­tion to the project, and told of the very long and detailed let­ters she had received from Al-Obeidy about his stu­dio prac­tice. He would write these by hand, have them pho­tographed and then sent dig­i­tally to Ams­ter­dam, where she would have them trans­lated. Much of his focus had lain on the elab­o­ra­tion of the tech­ni­cal aspects of his work, both ana­log and dig­i­tal. His equip­ment, and how it changed through the years, was another topic of conversation.

Before Sad­dam Hussein’s regime had waged his attacks on the Kur­dish parts of the pop­u­la­tion, Al-Obeidy had invested in expen­sive, large for­mat stu­dio equip­ment, which would obvi­ously have had to take care of his income in the com­ing years. How­ever, dur­ing the unrests, his stu­dio was destroyed and all his invest­ments were gone, which meant he had to move to a more afford­able place, fur­ther out, and start over again, cater­ing now no longer to the mid­dle and upper classes, but to the work­ing classes who lived in the out­skirts. Turn­ing to dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion must have allowed him to increase his out­put, and there­with con­tinue with his busi­ness — which explains per­haps larger num­bers of more recent por­traits being exhib­ited, rather than ones of more vin­tage dates.

The exhi­bi­tion of of Al-Obeidy’s archives has been given — prob­a­bly in part based on his own pref­er­ence as stated in the let­ters - a strong focus on the tech­ni­cal aspects of stu­dio pho­tog­ra­phy in Iraq, a coun­try with a rel­a­tively lim­ited pool of pho­to­graphic expe­ri­ence and resources. Shown are exam­ples of ana­log manip­u­la­tions with fil­ters, dou­ble expo­sures and retouch­ing, along with an explo­sion of dig­i­tal com­pi­la­tions using ready made back drops, cut­ting and past­ing of fig­ures — from dif­fer­ent times even — in one image, and com­plete dress­ing up par­ties to cre­ate in one ses­sion sev­eral images for dif­fer­ent occa­sions : look­ing pious, stu­dious or cool. But even if the shadow of war is exor­cised from the stu­dio with a counter attack of col­ors and dreamed up lives, you nev­er­the­less sense a grav­ity in the man­ner in which the por­trayed carry them­selves, imper­cep­ti­bly weighed down.

On request of the pho­tog­ra­pher, images of women have been left out of the exhi­bi­tion, except in the ear­lier pho­tographs from the 1960’s, when veil­ing was less com­mon than it is now. Fur­ther­more, the names of the sub­jects are not made pub­lic for rea­sons of pri­vacy. Per­haps this would have been dif­fer­ent when this mate­r­ial was shown in Iraq itself, or shared infor­mally on social media, but for a West­ern, for­eign pub­lic, anonymity was deemed more appropriate.

One thing needs to be said about this trip­tych below with the woman hold­ing the chil­dren. Of course it reminded me imme­di­ately of Linda Fregni Nagler’s The Hid­den Mother, pub­lished by Mack books, and which sur­pris­ingly hasn’t sold out yet. Here we see a sim­i­lar set up. Mir­jam Shatanawi told me the grand­par­ents of the chil­dren wanted an image of the grand­chil­dren, together with their son (I don’t remem­ber if he was the father or an uncle), who had died pre­vi­ously. The chil­dren, being quite young, needed help hold­ing still in the blue screen stu­dio. This, as in the book, is why the mother is hid­den — and for no other reason.

Bag­dad Photo Stu­dio is an exhi­bi­tion of which you can say that it is what it is: an overview of images selected from aphotographer’s inven­tory acquired for a museum’s col­lec­tion. It lacks a more advanced, self-conscious cura­to­r­ial approach, as for exam­ple Akram Zaatari has taken with his work on Hashem El Madani’s archives, with which he puts up for dis­cus­sion “the idea that the archival impulse has decon­tex­tu­al­ized orig­i­nal images by tak­ing them out of their social and polit­i­cal econ­omy, view­ing the lay­ers added to images through wear and tear as addi­tions of mean­ing in the life of a pho­to­graph. The con­flict­ing views of preser­va­tion ver­sus archae­o­log­i­cal, artis­tic, or anthro­po­log­i­cal imper­a­tives are also dis­cussed, within a dia­logue that con­sid­ers the chang­ing nature of pho­tog­ra­phy as a prac­tice across the region and beyond.” But that dis­cus­sion can still be had in the case of Al-Obeidy’s legacy. For the time being, the impor­tant fac­tor is that the archive has been safe­guarded for future explo­rations, and has been made pub­lic. Hope­fully, more acqui­si­tions will follow.

Recently, I came across a lush body of work on Kur­dish vil­lagers in Diyarbakir, who are becom­ing con­struc­tion work­ers help­ing to erase their own her­itage and way of life, which has to make way for what pho­tog­ra­pher Nico Baum­garten calls Con­trol Towers for their impact on how lives are shaped, lived and restructured.

I find myself being torn both ways about how Baum­garten con­tex­tu­al­izes the work. He intro­duces the series by invok­ing Gor­don Matta-Clark’s words: “The pro­lif­er­a­tion of urban and sub­ur­ban boxes [is] guar­an­tee­ing the ideal con­di­tions to obtain iso­lated, pas­sive con­sumers, an audi­ence kept in a state of captivity.”

Why am I so torn? Yes, what we see is typ­i­cal urban sprawl and the trans­fig­u­ra­tion of coun­try­side, as we know it from dif­fer­ent places on this planet where sim­i­lar processes are hap­pen­ing. Where other series some­times do lit­tle more than doc­u­ment and record these changes for archival or nos­tal­gic rea­sons, Baum­garten intro­duces the viewer to his work from the per­spec­tive of the (social) geo­g­ra­pher who looks at the cor­re­la­tion between power, phys­i­cal space and economics.

It’s a very attrac­tive way to talk about these rather com­plex processes, as it pro­vides us with the illu­sion that we have han­dles on the issues at hand. How­ever, we don’t know if these Kur­dish vil­lagers feel it in that way as well. Maybe they have a more nuanced view on the mat­ter, accept­ing some of the “progress” as wel­come and regret­ting other aspects.

In other words, there is a chance that the approach Baum­garten attempts could be unin­ten­tion­ally patron­iz­ing. I sim­ply don’t know enough about the issue to be able to tell. Per­haps, to bring myself closer, I should look for a novel from a Turk­ish or Kur­dish writer deal­ing with this topic and how dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als expe­ri­ence these changes? Or per­haps Baum­garten — although he may be on his way — isn’t quite there yet in find­ing the right way to frame his think­ing in his photographs?

As valid a ques­tion as Why don’t boys and men wear burqas or hijabs? is the ques­tion why don’t women in the Gulf region wear white abayas and niqabs, which must be obvi­ously much cooler in the local cli­mate than the pre­vail­ing black. After all, the men do get to wear white thobes, kan­duras or dishdashas.

The silly answer would be that in white, the women would look a lit­tle bit like ghosts, as you can imag­ine based on Angela Deane’s Ghost Pho­tographs. (Would be inter­est­ing to know if she would ever paint white over a found pho­to­graph with women in black veil in the frame.)

The less silly answer is that women have not always been veiled only in full black, and in some parts of the Arab penin­sula their cloth­ing actu­ally was a ver­i­ta­ble color feast, as you can see from ear­lier color pho­tographs from Yemen or Oman. And in Kuwait, girls tra­di­tion­ally wore (and some still wear) very richly embroi­dered out­fits as well.

Nowa­days, the fash­ion trend in abayas seems to go towards more col­or­ful embroi­deries, dif­fer­ent shapes and cuts, with in some cases even col­ored fab­ric being used — see for exam­ple the abaya sec­tion on Haute Ara­bia, which fea­tures even abaya jump­suits or drop by the swimwear sec­tion for some weird nos­tal­gia. The end of the hege­mony of the black abaya would prob­a­bly make a wor­ry­ing dent in the mar­ket share of Per­sil Abaya Sham­poo, a Ger­man tech­nol­ogy prod­uct from Henkel designed espe­cially to keep your abaya a rich, deep black, of course only avail­able in the Gulf countries.

from Haute Arabia’s 2014 Abaya collection.

Hav­ing said all this, I should stress that Angela Deane’s Ghost Pho­tographs are not intended as an exper­i­ment in paint­ing the abaya white. Instead, she writes: “In these [found] pho­tographs, I cover the peo­ple with paint, sub­tract­ing the spe­cific iden­tity of each per­son and trans­form­ing them into anony­mous ghosts for the viewer to project upon. In this way, a pri­vate and spe­cific expe­ri­ence becomes an open and shared one through the mate­r­ial addi­tion of paint on pho­to­graph. Through this haunt­ing of the mate­r­ial, the ghosts become us and we become the ghosts. We become the ghosts of our every­day.” - Which strangely does reflect back on the vis­i­bil­ity of the human (female) fig­ure in pub­lic space.

These days, I detect (in myself and oth­ers) a def­i­nite appetite for vin­tage footage from the Mid­dle East that is nei­ther war torn (and news wor­thy), or pic­turesque, painterly, iconic or exotic (and good for col­or­ful travel mag­a­zines and post­cards), but that is just mun­dane, unspec­tac­u­lar, work related, ran­dom, some­times clumsy or even slightly bor­ing. The stuff that was never born for off­set presses or rota­tional print­ing, but only for the fam­ily album or slide show. In other words, pho­tographs that aren’t too obvi­ously made to sell me a story, and that play into my per­ceived sense of guilt and com­plic­ity, my feel­ings of pow­er­less­ness vis-a-vis the mis­ery of war and con­flict, the lack of equal­ity, jus­tice, wis­dom and pros­per­ity for all. Or that appeal to me with the lure of the per­fect tourist trap.

Yet strangely enough, as Erik Kessels’ pub­li­ca­tions demon­strate so well, that absence of the com­mer­cial edge, the lack of pre­tense of the images is what in the 21st cen­tury can be turned into the per­fect com­mer­cial prod­uct. So once the archives really start open­ing up, I am expect­ing — for bet­ter or for worse — an avalanche of photo books from these quar­ters that are far from empty.

Iran, 1970

All images in this post were found on the now defunct blog Still Proud to be Lib­eral, and show the life of a typ­i­cal Amer­i­can ex-pat fam­ily work­ing in the Saudi (Aramco?) oil indus­try in the late 60s, early 70s — roughly up until the 1973 oil cri­sis and the Yom Kip­pur war. And just like in the nov­els of Thomas Hardy, where the faint whistling of a steam train changed an entire land­scape from rural to indus­trial, also here, in the seem­ing inno­cence and care­free com­po­sure of fam­ily life, there is never a full escape from the shadow of oil & its pol­i­tics.

… just because of your end­less col­lec­tion of ran­dom quirky beau­ti­ful inspir­ing images on that quaint trea­sure trove of a web­site you have: The Visual Telling of Sto­ries. And every night I will invent a story to tell for each image that you found (scanned), uploaded and shared with the world. So thank you very much for that labor of love. Your work has made Mrs.Deane a happy woman.

From Lil­liput — Jux­ta­po­si­tions 1940Essay on the advan­tages of sleep­ing in bed alone — by Grou­cho Marxpaper fold­ing sequences

Much (and much non­sense) has been writ­ten on the reluc­tance and/or resis­tance among mus­lims against being pho­tographed. There may be a reluc­tance against hav­ing their por­trait taken by non-family mem­bers, but that doesn’t mean there are no fam­ily albums with snap­shots of fam­ily mem­bers or hol­i­days. They just rarely get shared in pub­lic. How­ever, for the younger gen­er­a­tions things are chang­ing. There is a markedly grow­ing inter­est in pre­serv­ing their per­sonal his­tory, and mak­ing that a col­lec­tively shared expe­ri­ence via the avail­able social media.

Zamaan, a tum­blr blog and an Insta­gram feed, has been set up with exactly that pur­pose. The vin­tage pho­to­graph col­lected on these plat­forms are a curi­ous mix of stu­dio por­traits, fam­ily snap­shots and images found online by pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers who have trav­elled in the region — but these are rarely if ever cred­ited. Copy­rights do not appear very high on the agenda. The num­ber of fam­ily snap­shots — of both men and women — is grow­ing, which is a telling sign.

As a belated cel­e­bra­tion of mother’s day, I’ve selected a num­ber of por­traits from Khaleeji moms and dads, doing pretty much what most moms and dads do in front of a cam­era: smil­ing, pos­ing, try­ing to look awe­some, look­ing awk­ward, hang­ing out with friends and play­ing with the kids. Quelle surprise…

Noura Tashkandi’s mother with her three lit­tle sis­ters in Saudi, 1973Ahmadalareef’s father, Saeed Ibrahim Mohammed Sul­tan AlA­reef AlD­ha­heri, exper­i­ment­ing with mul­ti­ple expo­sure when it was all the hype, UAE, 1980sLamia AlKhalidi’s mother in Riyadh, Saudi, 1990Hamed Al Melhem’s father pray­ing in the desert dur­ing the lib­er­a­tion of Kuwait in 1991Mayoo Abdulla’s father play­ing peek-a-boo with her baby brother in Saudi Ara­bia, 1983Mai’s father (on the left) and uncle in Egypt, circa 1977Sha­hab AlBahar’s mother, KuwaitMaryam Al Ansari’s father in Mesaieed, Qatar dur­ing the early 70sRamyalani’s father in Saudi, circa 1975Sophia Al Maria’s father rock­ing a high thob col­lar, Saudi, circa early to mid 1970sBalqes Al Thaidi’s father and friends in Kuwait, 1970sMaha’s father in north­ern Saudi, 1980sReam Jazzar’s Saudi hip­ster dad in Ari­zona, 1979Meshayel’s father in Umm al-Quwain, UAE, late 1960sRamy Alani’s Saudi mother in Venice, Italy, 1984. (more scans on http://instagram.com/ramyalani )Zahwa’s father with his friends in Yemen, 1980

We’re stay­ing on Flickr, and are fast-forwarding now to 1982, the year a man called Den­nis Sylvester Hurd came to Kuwait on a teach­ing assign­ment as a lan­guage and sci­ence teacher at the Al Bayan Bilin­gual School. These vin­tage streetviews of a very laid back look­ing Kuwait are in his shoe­box of snap­shots doc­u­ment­ing his life through the years. What I like about them is their lack of pre­tense cou­pled with a pecu­liar post­card aes­thet­ics — and the fact that they are so devoid of ori­en­tal­ism and totally down to earth.

As I men­tioned ear­lier, when prepar­ing for the con­ver­sa­tion with Mohammed al Kouh, I looked for old images from Kuwait between 1950 — 1980. I was sur­prised to find a lively inter­est in this topic, much more so than from other GCC coun­tries, includ­ing a fair amount of footage being made avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic, often on places like Flickr, which is what is good about that platform.

Dur­ing Kuwait Weeks I will share a few of my finds, begin­ning with the albums of Frances Had­den Andrus, as posted on Flickr by his rel­a­tive, David Fos­ter, who writes:

“Frances Had­den Andrus was employed by Bech­tel Inter­na­tional (based out of San Fran­cisco, Cal­i­for­nia) about 1950 in the Per­sian Gulf. This is his per­sonal photo album from the Per­sian Gulf, of the peo­ple of Kuwait, con­struc­tion, and his fel­low employees.

Much of the sub­ject mat­ter in these pho­tographs was heav­ily dam­aged or destroyed in the 1991 Per­sian Gulf War.”

The Andrus archives do not have the com­mer­cial or artis­tic poten­tial of a Vivian Maier, but they are nonethe­less impor­tant for what they show of the per­sonal life of an employee who helped build the oil indus­try, relat­ing once again how our so called high tech indus­tries are made with very basic man­ual labor, some­thing that we like to keep out of sight.

Apart from that, these archives are also impor­tant for what they not show — but what is there regard­less, the his­tory of the pol­i­tics of oil, for instance. Last year, Aljazeera broad­casted a web doc­u­men­tary in which they gave a broad out­line of this his­tory, in four parts, called The Secret of the Seven Sis­ters. The screen­shot below is from Part 1.

And the Bech­tel Inter­na­tional com­pany? It exists as of today, and devel­oped into a global player on the energy mar­ket, as the Bech­tel Cor­po­ra­tion. It was recently in the news for a fraud related case against one of their for­mer exec­u­tives, who is charged with “Fraud and Money Laun­der­ing” for an alleged Eight-Year Scheme to Obtain More Than $5 Mil­lion in Kick­backs from Three For­eign Power Com­pa­nies to Secure More Than $2 Bil­lion in Lucra­tive Con­tracts”.
– And here we are again, in the Shadow World.

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It sounds a bit dry per­haps, but I guess that’s because this pro­gram wants to appeal to the aca­d­e­m­i­cally inclined among the cura­tors? In any case, it’s an afford­able oppor­tu­nity for young cura­tors with over three years of work­ing expe­ri­ence. Dead­line com­ing up March 20th!

“Fol­low­ing ICI’s Cura­to­r­ial Inten­sive in Addis Ababa with the Zoma Con­tem­po­rary Art Cen­ter (ZCAC) in 2014, and in Johan­nes­burg with The Bag Fac­tory Artists’ Stu­dios in 2013, ICI con­tin­ues its com­mit­ment to sup­port­ing cura­to­r­ial train­ing in Africa, and to devel­op­ing regional net­works, with the Cura­to­r­ial Inten­sive in Mar­rakech. The pro­gram will focus on the cul­tural land­scape of West Africa and the Maghreb while also explor­ing the role of cura­tors work­ing for both local and inter­na­tional audi­ences. The sem­i­nars of this pro­gram will be con­ducted mostly in Eng­lish, but also in Ara­bic and French. Trans­la­tion will be avail­able when nec­es­sary, but work­ing pro­fi­ciency in Eng­lish is essen­tial and famil­iar­ity with more than one lan­guage is rec­om­mended. “

George Arbid, King­dom of Bahrain National Par­tic­i­pa­tion, Bien­nale di Venezia 2014Fundamentalists and Other Arab Modernisms.Architecture from the Arab World 1914–2014 Bahrain Min­istry of Cul­ture, Bahrain; Arab Cen­tre for Archi­tec­ture, Beirut

Ste­fano Graziani pointed me to a Call for Cap­tions by the Cana­dian Cen­tre for Archi­tec­ture (CCA), an inter­est­ing premise also with a view on the cur­rent debates sur­rounded the lat­est WPP awards:

“We’re inter­ested in how cap­tions influ­ence the way we read pho­tographs. Cap­tions can cloud and clar­ify. They can attack an image or stand apart, appar­ently neu­tral and trans­par­ent. They might seem tran­quil, but can be fraught. They are def­i­nitely rela­tional things. They involve an inter­ac­tion, and we think the best way to con­tinue to think about cap­tions is to invite you to join a con­ver­sa­tion with us.“

Mon­treal weather reports tell me it’s cold out­side… but you can stay warm at the open­ing of the Art Souter­rain fes­ti­val tonight, where Stead Bureau cos­mo­naut Mari Bas­ta­shevski takes you on a tour through the very spe­cial realm of state sur­veil­lance in inter­net hyper­space. And to cel­e­brate this happy occa­sion, let’s remem­ber the cheer­ful lyrics of the Red Dwarf theme song!

I’ll pack my bags and head into hyper­spaceWhere I’ll suc­ceed at time-warp speedSpend my days in ultra­vi­o­let raysFun, fun, fun, In the sun, sun, sun.

We’ll lock on course straight through the uni­verseYou and me and the galaxyReach the stage where hyper-drive’s engagedFun, fun, fun, In the sun, sun, sun,Fun, fun, fun, In the sun, sun, sun. … See MoreSee Less